Next Generation Blockchain Protocol With Scalability, Security, And Extensibility: Interview with Fan Long, co-founder at Conflux.

Fan Long is a co-founder at Conflux, a next generation blockchain protocol with scalability, security, and extensibility, committed to integrating blockchain technology into real-world scenarios. Fan will be telling us more about Conflux in this interview.

Please tell us your name and about yourself?

My name is Fan Long, and I’m a co-founder at the Conflux Foundation, but also currently an assistant professor and researcher at the University of Toronto at the Department of Computer Science. The focus of the research I’ve been working on includes discovering and developing solutions to security vulnerabilities in software systems, along with improving the efficiency and scalability of blockchain networks. One the the most well known papers that my co-founders at Conflux and I had written was called “Scaling Nakamoto Consensus to Thousands of Transactions Per Second,” which was the very paper that inspired Conflux in the first place.

What is Conflux?

One of the root problems that all blockchain networks face today boils down to the scalability conundrum. Proof of Work protocols like Bitcoin and Ethereum offer the highest degree of decentralization, but the throughput is so low at just 3-15 transactions per second (TPS) that facilitating meaningful transactions or building highly trafficked applications on the network is fruitless. At the same time, smart contracts deployed in Ethereum often contain irrecoverable bugs leading to millions-of-dollar losses.

This is where Conflux comes into play. Conflux is building a next-generation, highly-scalable cryptocurrency and smart contract blockchain enabled by a novel consensus algorithm that is going to build scalable, secure, and extensible blockchain platforms for future decentralized blockchain applications.

What is the technical advantage of Conflux?

Conflux makes bandwidth the only bottleneck for scalability based on its novel algorithm. In other words, the consensus algorithm is no longer the bottleneck as it relates to for scalability, and thereby can support all applications on the blockchain under current Internet and bandwidth restrictions.

To achieve this, unlike other scalability solutions including DPoS and a hybrid consensus, the Conflux consensus algorithm is based entirely on the purest for of a Nakamoto Consensus, so our Proof of Work consensus is fully decentralized and permissionless without any hierarchy. But to achieve a high throughput, and avoid the pitfalls of BTC and ETH, Conflux uses a Tree Graph (TG) directed acrylic graph structure, which does not discard but rather incorporates these forks into the consensus.

Finally, Conflux has invented a self-adjusting consensus algorithm, called the Greedy Heaviest Adaptive SubTree (GHAST), which adjusts the difficulty of mining based on where the hash power is distributed in real-time – whether on the main chain or pivot chains – so that it encourages network participants to converge and establish consensus.

What problems are you solving in the blockchain market and what major features and services make Conflux unique?

There have been different ways blockchain projects have sought to solve the scalability problem, whether it’s running supernodes as you see with Proof of Stake networks, but will sacrifice decentralization as often times networks select an arbitrary and oftentimes limited number of nodes that are relied on to achieve consensus. But if you really think about this model, what’s really different between a PoS consensus model and a regular centralized server?

Conflux uses a unique Tree Graph (TG) directed acrylic graph structure, meaning that transactions aren’t recorded on single blocks in a single chain. Rather all transactions are recorded and linked together, but organized. At the same time, Conflux is the first protocol that’s managed to launch a working testnet based on the DAGTG system and runs 20,000 full nodes.

Do you have more opportunities for investors and partners at Conflux?

While we’ve launched our mainnettestnet, we’re currently preparing for the launch of our mainnet later this year. , and will make our tokens available as well at that time.

We are now in the process of developing a Distributed Ledger on the testnet, so that all the pre-mined testnet tokens will be recorded and later transferred to mainet token once it’s launched. Also a Bounty Program will soon be launched. Our tasks varies from technical, business, marketing and much beyond. more so Wwe encourage all contributions and participations.

How Safe is Conflux for investors, would you like to talk about your legal and security measures?

When we talk about security measures for PoW chains, the real problem we are talking about or we need to solve is thatwhat happens when a transaction is confirmed. Conflux spendshas spent one year on developing the Ssecurity module itself. On Bitcoin, it takes 6 blocks – that is 1 hour – to confirm a transaction. For Ethereum the number is 15 to 30, which is 4 to 8 minutes. However, on Conflux it takes justonly takes 23 seconds to is confirm a transaction, while maintaining the same level of security as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

To elaborate, from our latest paper, Conflux generates 4 blocks (300K) per second, and takes 100 blocks to confirm. Hence the 23 seconds confirmation time. This is one of Conflux’s major advantage as PoW chains like . Bitcoin and Ethereum are ofbased on the Longest Chain Principle consensus. so it It i’s not possible for them to generate blocks at such high speedsspeed due to frequent forking.

At what stage of development is the Conflux project and what is next on your roadmap?

Currently, we’ve launched our testnet, and currently have managed to achieve some remarkable milestones that have proven the feasibility of our network. We’re able to support up to 12K nodes at approximately at 9.38 Mbs. In other words, transactions on our fully decentralized network are completed within 23 seconds. While we’re excited for this development, we’re currently in conversations with partners that are ready to deploy their network onto our platform, and the latest to join us is Celer Network, a second layer scaling solution for fast off-chain transactions.

Conflux is a protocol that can be adopted to any scenario seeking decentralization with high performance. To name a few immediate We find that there’s a few applications, including remittance, DApps and decentralized exchanges that can benefit from deploying their products on the ConsensusConflux network.

Could you tell us about your team and your group of university professors and researchers?

The Conflux team is made up of renowned scientists and university professors at Tsinghua University and the University of Toronto, where we’ve been working on theoretical protocol designs such as a consensus algorithm, along with incentive mechanisms and have proven to turn theoretical designs into real system implementations.